"We're continuously monitoring water quality," Mr. Sheehan said.
United Water New Jersey, which issued the advisory, is monitoring water quality, utility officials said.
"We are monitoring water quality every minute of each day to ensure its quality and safety," the utility said.
In 2009 the ministry of housing and urban-rural development, which is responsible for monitoring water quality in cities, carried out a survey.
Emergency teams were out in force this weekend pumping away floodwater across northern England, repairing defences, clearing blocked rivers and monitoring water levels.
Are they going to be out there 24 hours, seven days a week monitoring water quality?" The D.E.C. plans to hold another public meeting about the proposal next month in Kent.
Defra said more than 700 EA staff were on standby, many already checking flood defences, clearing blockages and monitoring water levels, with 85% of the country's temporary flood barriers now in use in Cumbria.
New York City environmental inspectors first noticed high levels of fecal coliform in the Bronx River, which flows from Westchester into the East River, while monitoring water quality in Long Island Sound.
GULF COAST WATERSHED RECOVERY FUND -- The fund (rivernetwork.org) will make grants to groups that need to replace office space, and to support longer-term objectives, like monitoring water quality and advocating for a wetlands restoration effort to help safeguard against future hurricane destruction.
About a third of the local jurisdictions surveyed have not yet adopted the E.P.A.'s criteria for monitoring water quality, which call for testing five times a month for E. coli (at freshwater beaches, such as the Great Lakes) and enterococcus bacteria (in ocean waters).
"Right now we spend over a billion dollars a year monitoring water, hundreds of millions of dollars monitoring air and looking at foods for pesticides and the rest," said Dr. Richard J. Jackson, the director of the National Center of Environmental Health, which undertook the study.
